Reuters published an exclusive story about Kaspersky allegedly submitting false virus samples to Virus Total.
The goal was to trick other antivirus vendors into blocking legitimate files (drivers, system files) and harm their customers.
“Beginning more than a decade ago, one of the largest security companies in the world, Moscow-based Kaspersky Lab, tried to damage rivals in the marketplace by tricking their antivirus software programs into classifying benign files as malicious, according to two former employees”.
“They said the secret campaign targeted Microsoft, AVG Technologies, Avast Software and other rivals, fooling some of them into deleting or disabling important files on their customers’ PCs”.
“Some of the attacks were ordered by Kaspersky Lab’s co-founder, Eugene Kaspersky, in part to retaliate against smaller rivals that he felt were aping his software instead of developing their own technology, they said”.
Eugene considered this stealing,
said one of the former employees. Both sources requested anonymity and said they were among a small group of people who knew about the operation.
“Kaspersky Lab strongly denied that it had tricked competitors into categorizing clean files as malicious, so-called false positives”.
“Our company has never conducted any secret campaign to trick competitors into generating false positives to damage their market standing,” Kaspersky said in a statement to Reuters. “Such actions are unethical, dishonest and their legality is at least questionable.”
